Albion: The Foundation Myth of Britain as the
Cultural Embodiment of the British Soul

The foundation myth of Britain arises out of TheNew
Chronicles and The Bruts depiction of the daughters of King Dioclician
plotting to murder (or actually succeeding in their plans) their husbands and being
banished to sea only to shipwreck on an island they name Albion. The idea of the
oppression of women and the manner in which they vindicate themselves, coupled with the
idea of the quest and of the search, set the background for William
Blakes elucidation of his theosophical assertions of the divinity of man in his
epic poems "Visions
of the Daughters of Albion" and "Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant
Albion." Though the island was called Albion as a result of Albynas unequivocal
proclamation' , it is probable that Blake also
drew his understanding of the myth from an alternative claim in Spensers The Faerie
Queene (II, x, 11, and IV, xi, 16), that the name Albion was bestowed "in honor
of an ancestral giant who conquered the British Isles" (Blake 68), but was later
killed in France by Hercules (Spenser 261). In spite of the fact that Blake's mythology is
totally recreated, as he did not want the associations that his readers would usually draw
from common mythological names to interfere with the world he was trying to establish
through his poetry, Blakes dealings with Albion are rooted fundamentally in the
historical tradition of which he is most indelibly a part.

The myth upon which Blake draws is binate, in that it relies on two
separate foundation myths that must converge into one another to achieve their resolution.
Upon arriving in this new land, the thirty (or thirty-three) sisters under the leadership
of the eldest, called Albyna, are deceived into mating with devils in the shape of men and
spawn from these unions a race of giants who rule the island of Albion until they are
overthrown by Brutus, the great-grandson of the Trojan Aeneas. In his "Visions of the
Daughters of Albion," Blake proposes a rape that "takes place
quickly (while) the rest of the work is devoted to tracing its causes, consequences,
and implicationsfor the victim, Oothoon, her fiance, Theotormon, and the rapist,
Bromion" (69), where the culmination of the tragedy lies in Oothoons achieving
"psychological liberation" from the consequences of the rape, and is able to
enlighten her sisters, the daughters of Albion, who "hear her woes, &
eccho back her sighs" (plate 8, 13). Similarly, the sisters of Albion in The New
Chronicles, and also in The Brut, are just as oppressed as Oothoon in their
being raped by devils and eventually subsumed by the wild giants they spawn.
These children are punished for the sins of their fathers (and mothers) by Brutus, who
invades Albion, renames it Briton, and slays the giantsthus redeeming the island and
destroying the monstrous progeny of the sisters. In this way, Brutus becomes both hero and
saviora prophet who, like Moses, can lead his people into the promised land and
conquer it for them with the strength of his god behind him. In "Jerusalem: The
Emanation of the Giant Albion," Blake makes Britain itself the hero in hopes of
reuniting it with its spiritual center, in much the same way as Brutus tries to invoke his
homeland by naming his capital New Troy (which later becomes London). The evolution of
this myth develops into such that "by the time Caxton prints the legendary history of
Britain, one of the giants will be named Albionas if the land, the founding woman,
and the monster were all one and the same, and all equally opposed to patriarchal
imprintation" (Cohen 50). It is from the emanation of the mythic consciousness that
Blake may have found an important source in forming the idea of Albion as a fallen part of
God that has yet to awaken to its divine potential.

The author of the New Chronicles as catalogued under the
American Council of Learned Societies British Manuscripts Project makes a dramatic
detour from the author of The Brut as edited by Friedrich Brie under the Early
English Text Society in the telling of the origin myth of Albion. The story in the New
Chronicles reads that a Grecian king married his thirty daughters to lesser kings
within the sphere of his influence and that these daughters conspired against their
husbands lives, were found out before they could commit their crime by the waxing
courage of one of the daughters who loved her husband more than she despised his power
over her, and were exiled to wherever the sea would carry their vessel. In the Brie
version, however, the number of King Dioclicians daughters changes to thirty-three,
who were able to successfully carry out their murderous intentions and were only
afterwards condemned to exile. Their motives, nonetheless, do not change in the telling
between the two authors, but Bries version is more explicit and comprehensive.

The daughters are led, according to Bries transcription, by the
eldest, Albyna, who, having been married against her will, "bycome so stoute & so
sterne, þat sche told litel prys of her lord, And of hym hadde
scorne and dyspite, and wolde not done his wylle, but wolde haue here owne wyll in
diuerses maners" (2). She would rather they slay their husbands under their
fathers roof after receiving his chastisement for disobeying them than return to
their marital exile and be chastened into submission. Regardless of how the tale of their
success is told, all are guilty of conspiracy to treason, a crime for which King
Dioclician had the power to put his daughters to death. Yet, above all other
considerations, these traitors were still born of his blood, and were therefore given the
opportunity of exile with provisions for six months at sea. This served the dual purpose
of ridding the land of Greece of their rebellious presence and of ridding themselves of
the patriarchal power structure that had for so long oppressed them. This exile eventually
leaves them on an island at the other end of the world where they are given the
opportunity to start anew. Once on this island, in both renditions, the women become
independent creatures capable of governing their own affairs in a grotesque reversal of
the traditional hierarchy of powerthey have already made a strong statement of their
desire for independence through their actions against the male establishment under which
they had once been condemned. Once left to their own devices, however, they never
establish a civilization, but continue to live wild. After surviving for some time off the
wild herbs and wild animals with which the island was populated, they ironically come to
sexually desire the company of men. Because nature abhors such role reversals, the
daughters are made to pay for their insolence by demons that spawn of them giants who
reconsummate themselves upon their mothers own flesh. Thus, the land of Albion,
named after Albyna, becomes a land filled with giants until the coming of the age of
Brutus.

The founder of Briton, who conquered the island and rid it of
Albions monstrous sonsa , brings forth a new era in the
cultural identity of the island by reinstituting the Eastern patriarchy that Albyna and
her sisters had fought so hard to overcome. It could be argued that the sons of Albion had
already reasserted male dominance in their sexual empowerment over their mothers were they
only human. Instead, they outlive their mothers by eight centuries and live as wild and
uncivilized as brutes during their tenure on the island. Aside from the greater length and
development of Bries transcription, there is no major deviation between the two
versions on this account. Brutus was the great-grandson of Aeneas, who had fled Troy after
its defeat at the hands of the Greeks with his father, Anchises, and son, Ascanius. In
Italy, Ascanius beget Silvius, who fathered Brutus, the child who was destined to kill
both his mother and father and reconstitute the kingdom of Troy in a land that would one
day conquer the world. It happened that Brutus mother died in the bearing of him and
he accidentally shot his father with an arrow while hunting fifteen years beyond that. For
the death of his father, Brutus was sent into exile, whereupon he helped free four
generations of Trojan slaves from their Greek masters and prevailed against the Greek king
in battle.

The Brutus myth parallels the Albion myth in this respect, as this
second Trojan war began with a cry from Brutus against the Greek King Pandrasus that the
enslaved Trojans under his leadership "hold it better far to live in the wilderness,
and to feed like animals on raw flesh and herbs, with freedom, than amid feasting and
luxury under slavery," because "it is both nature and duty that every slave
should struggle to win back his ancestral dignity and his freedom" (Monmouth 226-7).
It was for those very reasons that Albyna and her sisters had rebelled against the tyranny
of their husbands. In this reversal, however, the rebels defeat the Greek king and his
lords and take off with his only daughter, Innogen, as wife to Brutus. They leave as the
victors instead of as the vanquished. Just as Albynas rebellion against male
dictatorship was a sign of liberation, the conquest of the female will by Brutus is a sign
of male potency and superiority. After taking his leave of Greece with all the spoils of
war he can carry, Brutus withdraws with his men to a deserted Aegean island where stands a
temple of Diana, the goddess of the hunt. After performing his ablutions, Brutus receives
from the goddess a prophecy of his future, which directs him to the island at the corner
of the world inhabited by the beast-like descendents of Dioclicians daughters. On
his way to this island, Brutus lands in Africa and joins forces with another group of
displaced Trojans under the leadership of Corineus, the giant slayer. Together, they
invade France and come away with riches on a scale that the least among them was dressed
in embroidered gold. These successes behind them, they land on Albion and rename it
Briton, whereupon Brutus consecrates a new temple to Diana and defeats the giants who
dwell there. After all the giants are slain save the leader, named Gogmagogb , Corineus engages in a wrestling match with him and throws him
over a cliff to be smashed on the rocks beneath. Upon this occurrence, Briton is freed of
giants and is ruled by the descendents of Brutus till the coming of the Romans about
seven-hundred years later under Julius Caesar in 47 B. C. (5215 years from the beginning
of the world, according to Nennius [23]), following whom, about half a millennium later,
came the Saxon Angles, after which the island was renamed. The greatest difference between
the Roman tenancy in Briton and the Anglo occupation is that the Romans did not
permanently settle the land, which afforded the British a great deal of latitude in their
daily affairs, while the Angles moved in and their cultures were merged. The legacy that
Brutus created, therefore, was one that provided continuity through the invasions and even
up to the present day.

The progress of this foundation myth has been traced extensively in
various editions of The Brut, though, as stated in the New Chronicles, the
Albion myth is one of which almost no other chronicle makes mention. Geoffrey of
Monmouths Historia Regum Britanniae, written in Latin around 1125 A. D.,
which is the original source drawn upon by La3amonc through an
1136 A. D. French translation by Wace, and was used by Blake as one of his sources, begins
not with the Albion foundation myth, but with that of the fall of Troy and the legend
incumbent on Brutus origins. It mentions the giants in Albion that Brutus had to
conquer, but does not explain how they came to be there. Wace himself begins about 1500
years after Brutus acquisition of the land, starting his Brut around the time
of King Arthur and the reign of his father, Uther Pendragon. It is from this that La3amon,
writing about a century later, is forced to extrapolate, which might be the reason why he
also leaves out the Albion myth though he starts at Brutus heritage. Even so, he
doubles the length of Waces text, managing to translate, according to Tatlock,
"not only his language and style, but also his cultural background, from those
expected among mid-twelfth century Normans to those of more primitive people" (Le
Saux 27). Sir Frederic Madden adds to this the fact that "we find preserved in many
passages of La3amons poem the spirit and style of the earlier Anglo-Saxon
writers" (Le Saux 184), suggesting that La3amon tried to recreate a time before the
Norman influence interposed itself unto the English mythology. To this, Henry Cecil Wyld
asserts that "La3amon is thus in the true line of succession to the old poets of his
land. His vocabulary and his spirit are theirs. His poetry has its roots, not merely in
the old literary tradition but also in the essential genius of the race" (Le
Saux 187, ellipses his). Le Saux adds, "that even though the Brut
scrupulously follows the order of events of Waces Roman de Brut, the poem has
a different inner structure through the shifting of weight from one episode to
another" (32). Instead of the sections being uniformly expanded or compressed,
La3amon followed his own cultural identity as a Briton over Waces comparable
subjectivity as a Frenchmand . That La3amon is able to still
consider himself British half a millennium after the Anglo conquest is shown in his
"harmonious passage from Briton to English rule," which "contrasts strongly
with the antagonism La3amon expresses towards the Normans," to which extent,
"the Brut may read as an attempt to kindle a spirit of solidarity between the
Welsh and the English, the legitimate inhabitants of Britain, against the invaders"
(Le Saux 227). This shows not only a form of nationalism on the part of La3amon, but also
continuity from the original lineage of Brutus into the Middle Ages, which is something
that will, in half a millennium beyond the cultural fusion of the Anglo-British and the
Normans, be resurrected by Blake as an unbroken chain of cultural tradition. In response
to La3amon, however, came the publication of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut in 1272,
which was followed by the Middle English and Latin prose Brut in 1415, and the
Middle English New Chronicles in 1437, from the last of which comes the
counter-myth to Bries translation of the Bodleian manuscript. It is in these final
two versions that the first recordings of the Albion myth preceding the arrival of Brutus
to the island are found.

None of these editions might have been possible were it not for the
early recordings of Nennius, a "pupil of the holy Elvodug" who undertook in the
late eighth and early ninth century "to write down some extracts that the stupidity
of the British cast out" (Nennius 1). Nennius, however, records Brutus title in
one account as being a Roman consul, though other myths point to his having founded his
nation on British soil three hundred years before the foundation of the city of Rome (18).
He finds another myth that places Brutus as the great-grandson of Noah, who was born of
Hessitio, son of Japheth, the one to whom Noah gave Europe after the flood (22). A third
myth places Brutus in the lineage of Aeneas through Ascanius grand-daughter Rhea
Silvia, who had a son named Alanus, who sired Hessitio, who beget Brutus (22).
Furthermore, Nennius records in one place that Silvius, the father of Brutus, was not the
son of Ascanius but of Aeneas himself, making Brutus the grandson, and not the
great-grandson, of Aeneas (19-20). In another place, he records the genealogy correctly,
noting Ascanius as Silvius proper sire (19). He records nothing at all about Albyna
and her sisters. This early confusion as to specific dates and genealogies arises from the
paucity of reliable information translated into A. D. dating, most of the early research
of which was laboriously and blindly done by scholars like Nennius. The difficulties
historians like him had to overcome should be readily understandable to an age that has
such difficulty placing even La3amons work in a specific period with all the
advances of our technology at our disposal. The problems of dating aside, Nennius was
transferring everything he find into what he intended to be a comprehensive volume that
would promulgate the hero worship of Brutus into a reflection of his own era. As Cohen
states,

From the reign of Augustus in imperial Rome to late medieval
historiography, an obsession with tracing patrilineage back to the heroes of fallen Troy
flourished, so that the Trojans became an entire race of founding fathers [the cause
being that] invoking Trojan descent was an easy way to legitimate newly established
regimes as well as to glorify existing orders by attaching to them long precedent and the
weight of classical tradition. (33)

Nennius immediate reasons for doing so seem to be patriotic, as
he was, after all, Welsh, and therefore a descendent of the Britons in general, and of
Brutus, in particular. The fragmentation of these collective myths show the importance the
British have placed in not only trying to grasp a historical understanding of their own
foundations, but also in their continuing redevelopment of a functional myth.

The fact that there are conflicting myths surrounding the biographies
of these early principals lends credence to the idea that the myth itself is not as
important as the message that the myth is trying to convey. That it has exceeded the
boundaries of plausibility while still maintaining a credible thematic and plot structure
proves that it can still serve as the legendary beginnings of a particular race of people.
It does not matter, therefore, that an adherent to the myth is forced to believe that a
boat with neither rudder nor oars would find as its first natural landing point on being
set loose in the Aegean an island that lay at a right turn beyond the coastlines of Italy,
North Africa, France, and the Iberian Peninsula. The gods could have guided it there
without its having to be some magic boat. It also does not matter that once on the island
the sisters of Albyna would suddenly find themselves attracted by demonic spirits of the
air and impregnated with demigod giants who later mate with them. Throughout the mythology
of the ancient world, there are similar stories of gods and goddesses coupling with humans
and siring or bearing children by them. After creating his gods in his own image, mankind
then turned around and tried to recreate himself in the image of his godshence the
genealogy of Brutus as having been descended from Jupiter. As a function of myth,
therefore, these stories need not show literal truth, but serve to illustrate an
allegorical one in order to perpetuate the teleology of the race and the anagogical
importance of the statement being made.

Seen in this light, Albyna and her sisters are revolutionaries seeking
liberation from an oppressive patriarchal hierarchy through active involvement in their
own destinies. It is for these same reasons, moreover, that Brutus Trojans withdraw
from the Grecian peninsulato them, living in Greece amongst their enemies and former
masters is tantamount to being dependent upon the beneficence of a dominant race. The
British people who pride themselves on their independence of spirit in the modern age,
therefore, can reflect happily on that spirit as an innate birthright. An explanation of
their character, thus, reaches beyond the structure of an impossible plot into thematic
justification for the self. The theme, which is larger than the plot, and which subsumes
it, carries the myth into the imagination and makes it part of the imaginative fabric of
the English mind in much the same way as the myth of Adam and Eve is a part of the
collective consciousness of Jews, Christians, and Moslems, regardless of how implausible
it is under literal scrutiny. The fact that the myth can sustain a peoples sense of
purpose also lends credence to the message it is trying to convey, for such a legacy as
one in which the goddess Diana bequeaths the descendents of Brutus the leadership of the
worlds peoples not only endorses, but also demands, future British colonialism on a
global scale. That the sun never set on the British Empire becomes as much a manifest
destiny to the cultural descendents of Brutus as reaching the Pacific Ocean had been to
the cultural descendents of the American Revolution. The cultural impact of this myth on
the world that the British endeavored to create is one of righteous aggression and
settlementa people who can rid a land of giants with their bare hands are a people
who are themselves giantsboth giant killers and descendents of giants, as the dual
foundation myths of Albyna and Brutus would make them.

Given this call to redeem the world in its own image, a call for
self-determination that necessarily includes the determination of the destiny of others
who affect that sense of self, poets like William Blake find moral justification for
invoking the sons and daughters of Albion towards the recreation of the world in the
British cultural image. Blake himself is regenerating the myth in his image and creating
for an entirely new system founded upon the fragments of the old. In "Jerusalem: The
Emanation of the Giant Albion," for instance, Blake asserts the responsibility of the
wanderer to create a homeland in his place of exile and to spread the values of his
adopted culture throughout the worldthat the culture to be disseminated is British
is a given, for it is therein that the promise of a chosen people lies. In this case,
Blake is specifically referring to the Jewish people, the original chosen of God, who are

addressed not as sinister devotees of a mistaken faith but as fellow
believers in one religion, now divided, who need to be instructed in the connection
between Jewish tradition and primordial Christianity as it developed mythically among the
ancient Britons. (Blake 308)

The rationale behind this is the tie Blake makes between Jewish
Cabalism and New Age theosophy, where the Jews "own Cabalistic myth of cosmic
man ought to be understood as applying to Albion, the traditional ancestral
personification of England" (308). If Albion, in Blakes cosmography, is the
amalgam of pieces broken off from the part of God that fell, or, according to Frye, is
"all the humanity that we know in the world of time and space, though visualized as a
single Titan or giant" (125), then mankind taken holistically is Gods other
half. This half of God, therefore, has been asleep since its fall, and it will remain
asleep until the Last Judgment, whereupon mankind will find himself redeemed through the
resurrection of Albion. In the interim, "the yet unfallen part of God," that
which fragmented mankind continues to worship, has "made seven attempts to awaken
him, and in the seventh Jesus himself descended into the world of Generation and began his
final redemption" (125). While the Bible does not make mention of this myth, the
Cabala does in the person of Adam Kadmon, "the universal man who contained within his
limbs all heaven and earth" (125), and it is to him that Blake refers when
introducing Albion.

What connection this has with the giants on Albion can be found in the
biblical narrative of the Jews entering the land of Canaan under the direction of Moses
and encountering, once there, the giant race called Anakim. Cohen writes, "the
inhabitants of Canaan are imagined as gigantic in order to convey the difficulty of the
ensuing settlement" (34). Blake, relying considerably, though not overtly, on Old
Testament mythology to advance his own mythic creation, can apply the giants of Jerusalem
to the giants of Albion, and, through a process of transference, he can recreate the
original man in the person of Albion. As to his connection with the heroine of the New
Chronicles, it lies in Albynas resemblance to Lilith, the first wife of Adam,
who rebelled against his authority and escaped into the world to mate with demons (again,
according to the Cabala). The female will is thus born out of Albion to balance and thwart
him, turning him into a house divided against itself. While the submissive Eve
was created to succor Adam, Lilith spawned thousands of devils that were later killed by
the Archangel Gabriel in retribution for her infidelity to her true husband and her
salacious behavior with the fallen angels, whereupon Lilith declared war against the sons
and daughters of Adam which her future progeny, the Lilim, continue to carry out in the
form of the sexually lascivious Incubi and Succubi, to confuse mankind from his awareness
of the divinity within himself and keep him, like Albion the Giant, asleep. The world then
passed through seven great periods, each representing one of the attempts of the unfallen
nature of God to awaken the fallen portion, which will culminate in the eighth attempt, or
the Apocalypse, when Albion actually does awaken. Albynas progeny, like
Liliths, is conquered by a god-sent messenger in the person of Brutus, who promises
to bring forth a new order in the world. This "conquest of England by the Trojan
Brutus symbolizes the final collapse of the great Druidic civilizations of antiquity"
(Frye 132), civilizations that had begun with the first druid Adam, which then
precipitated the beginning of Albions restoration.

As every age requires a new myth to sustain it, the gods of the old
religions become the devils of the new systems. Even though Blake, writing in Jerusalem,
states: "I must Create a System, or be enslavd by another Mans./ I will
not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create" (plate 10, 20-1), he still
remained firmly rooted in the cultural semantics of his language, so that whenever he
evoked a new being out of his poetry, he necessarily called into being all the old
associations incumbent upon its attributes. In "Visions of the Daughters of
Albion," Oothoon, who is betrothed to Theomorton, is raped by Bromion, after which
fact her kinswomen, the Daughters of Albion, can do nothing but "hear her woes and
eccho back her sighs" (plate 2, 20). On the historical level of analysis, the
daughters of Albion can imply merely any Englishwoman bemoaning the injustice of one of
their sex; on the allegorical level, however, these Englishwomen are still struggling
against patriarchal oppression that seeks to dominate their gender and force it into
submission. The difference here is in the reaction of the kinswomenrather than its
being one of outrage and action, it is one of pathetic resignation, as if in the
slaughtering of the sons of Albyna and her sisters, Brutus and his men were symbolically
killing the monstrous product of the independent female willin effect, killing that
will altogether, so that there is nothing the mourners for Oothoons forced
submission can do to redress it. Frye states that "the poem represents a conflict
between the tyranny of convention and an emancipated females demand for free
love" (240), hence Albynas own rebellion against the authority of the Grecian
lords and her embrace of the demon lovers. The only difference is in how it is received by
the societythat Oothoon finds pleasure in the rape damns her by convention, that
Albyna, living long before British convention is established by the patriarchal Brutus,
finds pleasure in it affirms her independence of spirit. In either case, the received
truth does not become the standard for the culture, but is judged by the standard already
created by the culture out of which these myths arise. That Blake is indeed drawing
parallels can be affirmed in the names he gives to his daughters of Albion, which include
Cambel, Gwendolen, Ignoge (also Innogen), Cordella, Mehetabel, Ragan, Gonorill, Gwinevere,
Estrild, Sabrina, and Conwenna, which Frye notes seem to be taken at random from Geoffrey
of Monmouths Historia Regum (370). The retelling of these myths in a creation
Blake asserts to be of his own making illustrates the process by which the myth is adapted
from the social mores into which the poet has been born.

The function of mythology as the ontological and ontic recreation of
truth, therefore, is its ultimate impact on the world, for each age must recreate for
itself a critical awareness of that truth through a process of the rediscovery of its
genesis. Robert Graves, in his collection of Greek myths, tells the story of Belus and the
Danaids, where King Belus, upon his death, left his twin sons, Aegyptus and Danaus,
control over his empire of Arabia and Libya. When it happened that they quarreled,
Aegyptus proposed a mass marriage between his fifty sons and Danaus fifty daughters,
his plans being that his sons would kill Danaus daughters on their wedding night.
The latter, however, having agreed, equipped his daughters with hairpins wherewith they
could stab their husbands on their wedding night, and this succeeded, with the exception
of one daughter who spared her husband because he had spared her maidenhead (200-3). The
similarity of this legend to the foundation of Albion helps prove the ubiquitous nature of
mythology and the deep role it plays in the cultural identity of a people, that the same
tropes representative of human nature and instinct can be created and recreated to suit
the developing needs of the society that is constantly recreating itself. Blakes
cosmography of Albion, therefore, is not so much a recreation of the myth as it is a
reconceptualization of his cultural identity and the role of that identity in the greater
world in which it resides. It is for this reason that Albion has survived three-thousand
years and continues to be subdued by the descendents of Brutus, for they are forever
representative of the new man carrying the old mans baggage, regardless of how many
pieces he drops along the way.

'

"For-as-mich as I am þ eldest suster of all þis cumpanye, & ferst þis land haue takyn, & for-as-meche as myn name is Albyna, y wil þat þis land be called Albyon, after myn owne name"
(Bodleian 4).

a

According to Cohen, this occurrence takes place 800
years after these giants are spawned unto the island. Albyna and her sisters are
"wholly replaced bysubsumed within" these beasts (49).

b

According to Cohen, this name is lifted either from
the Hebrew bible or from the Book of Revelation, "where Gog and Magog are nations led
by the devil to war against the kingdom of God" (35).

c

(cited by Le Saux as
circa 1185-1216 A. D. (10) [which Le Saux further cites the placement of J. S. P.
Tatlocks Legendary History of Britain as dating it between 1189-99 (4) and E.
G. Stanleys "The Date of La3amons Brut" assomewhere
around 1250(7)])

d

For an in-depth
rendering of La3amons cultural expansions and contractions beyond Wace, see Le
Sauxs La3amons Brut: The Poem and Its Sources, Chapter 3.

Bibliography:

Blake, William. "Visions of the Daughters of Albion." Blakes
Poetry and Designs.
Ed. by Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant. New York: W. W. Norton
and Company, 1979: 68-80.